You always know when something serious is going on in the world. Just tune in to BBC News and you’ll find Clive Myrie standing on a rooftop, under the brightest of bright lights and wearing a flak jacket, reading the news. Quite why Clive can’t read the news from London, as he normally does, I have no idea. Perhaps someone from the Beeb’s drama department advised that the gravity of the situation would be better illustrated by using him as target practice? Well, guess what? He’s back.
If the sight of Clive Myrie is reassuring, then having a dementia patient as leader of the western world is the exact opposite, as bombs and missiles are exploding all over the Middle East. My old mum was not the greatest political brain of her age but I’ll always remember her predicting that “if there is another world war, it will start in the Middle East”. I hope that 27 years after her passing that her vision of the future is not finally coming to pass.
Dementia Don, it seems to this old cynic, is at least doing a fine job at something, that something being to distract from his multiple appearances in the Epstein files, although to date Trump has managed to avoid publishing the juiciest parts of his relationship with the billionaire paedophile. You’d have thought kidnapping the president of Venezuela and setting fire to Iran was quite an extreme way of demonstrating his skills at subterfuge, but perhaps what’s actually in those files is particularly damning, even by Trump’s low standards?
It goes without saying that I am against the idea of theocratic maniacs running countries like Iran and indeed many other countries in the region. However, I am at a loss as to how we can deal with them, other than by acting with glacial speed to encourage them to ditch their extreme ideas and join the rest of the civilised world. Donald Trump has come to a very different conclusion, which is to bomb the fuck out of Iran and hope that more reasonable leaders come to the fore. Unfortunately, it appears that Sundowning Don’s military operation has also killed most of Ayatollah Khamenei’s likely successors.
It all seems so far away from us on our sceptered – or is it septic? – island. While Iran is equipped with some tidy weaponry, the man on the Clapham omnibus has little to fear from reprisals. Or does he?
If you’re living in any of the places currently under attack from Iran, you may not be feeling that way. If you are flying home from, say, Australia, you may be slightly concerned that your refuelling stop may now be unavailable, unless your flight crew fancies dodging a few stray missiles and drones in order to fill up with some Four Star. Even a holiday in Cyprus might be considered unwise at the moment.
If it’s not worrying enough to consider that we might be on the brink of another world war, it’s quite possible we could be headed for a major fuel crisis, as the price of petrol and gas increases and the British people start to panic, filling up their vehicles in case the pumps go dry? And then, there’s the threat of terrorism at home. Who’s to say there are not small cells of islamist crackpots across the land, ready to take out their revenge on us?
I would think the most likely result of the current campaign will be for Trump to declare victory at some point, for things to settle down for a while until the Epstein files are in the news again, in which case expect Trump to invade somewhere else, say Mexico.
We’ll know soon enough. When we turn on the evening news and Clive Myrie is sitting behind his desk, it will all be over and once he has handed over to the local news and the weather forecast, perhaps the next world war will be delayed again. If Clive is still there on that rooftop tonight, carry out some checks on where your nearest nuclear bunker is. With Trump in the White House, you never know when you might need it.
